Dead On Live returns to Berklee Performance Center Friday

Dead On Live returns to the Berklee Performance Center in Boston – where last year they played "Workingman’s Dead" and "American Beauty" in their entirety – on Friday, Nov. 30 to perform tracks from "Europe ’72," "Skull and Roses," "Garcia," and "Ace."

Guitarist Marc Muller’s musical career has brought him from studying classical music to playing in Southern rock cover bands to gigging for a decade with Shania Twain to having some of his original music played behind The Weather Channel’s "Local on the 8s" forecasts. These days he’s the creative force behind - and guitarist/singer - for Dead On Live, a band that recreates Grateful Dead albums note for note, both instrumentally and vocally.

The band returns to the Berklee Performance Center in Boston – where last year they played "Workingman’s Dead" and "American Beauty" in their entirety – on Friday, Nov. 30 to perform tracks from "Europe ’72," "Skull and Roses," "Garcia," and "Ace."

Reached at his home on the Jersey shore, Muller, the former Berklee student revealed that his affinity for copying what he heard on records is something he’s been doing for a long time.

"I started playing guitar when I was 6, and took classical lessons when I was 8," he said. "I remember the first thing I figured out, sitting next to our old phonograph, when I was around 11, was ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ right when it came out."

Muller’s first concert was the Grateful Dead at the Nassau Coliseum in 1973. A few years later, right out of high school, he joined Molly Cribb, a band that earned him a salary and gave him paid vacations, in return for playing five or six nights a week, covering the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and, of course the Dead.

In the midst of all of that Southern rock, as well as Muller being a Deadhead and listening to bluegrass music, a friend turned him on to what Jeff Beck was doing on guitar.

"That just blew me away," he said. "That opened my eyes, and I wanted to move on from what I was doing. So in 1981, when I was 21, I ended up going to Berklee."

Later gigs included playing guitar in the "sarcastic, New York-edged country band" The Surreal McCoys, a decade of traveling with Shania Twain, and eventually hooking up with former Styx guitarist Glen Burtnik, who was staging note-for-note recreations of Beatles albums as each one celebrated its 40th anniversary.

The idea of doing the same thing with Grateful Dead albums came to Muller a few years later when he was offered an opportunity to put on any show of his choosing at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, N.J.

"This was in 2010," he said. "I thought of the 40-year Beatles thing we had been doing, then I thought back to what else came out 40 years earlier, and I realized that ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty’ both came out in 1970. So I went in with headphones and too much time on my hands, and I painstakingly followed each note and each voice, and wrote out what they were doing."

Page 2 of 3 - This process might have started back with "Stairway to Heaven," but it continued on to his years at college, when it became a good way for Muller to make some spending cash.

"When I was at Berklee, people used to pay me to do transcriptions of music by Allan Holdsworth or Steve Morse," he said, laughing. "I was like a drug dealer on the corner. People would come up and request a song, and I’d be going, ‘Yeah, all right, 20 bucks, I’ll have it to you tomorrow.’ "

Anyone who caught a performance of Dead On Live doing their early shows would say that Muller’s "dealing" days really paid off, mainly because of the detail he went for, and achieved.

"There are overdubs on the Dead’s studio records," he said, then explained, "For example, on ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ Bob Weir doubled his guitar part. He actually played it twice. And the same with ‘Casey Jones.’ So when we played those, we had two guitarists playing onstage."

Muller’s ear for detail even includes capturing mistakes that were made on the records.

"If you listen to ‘Cumberland Blues,’ they totally lose a quarter of a beat, but then they turn it around within a few seconds," he said. "So we do that, too."

Muller’s plan, from the start, was to transcribe everything, choose players who could handle the exacting intricacies of the music, have them learn the parts at home on their own, then put it all back together into a stage presentation.

"The first time we got together for a rehearsal," he recalled, "we played ‘Uncle John’s Band.’ We played through the whole song, and at the end of it, you could hear a pin drop. We all just looked at each other, stunned, and then we were laughing hysterically, because no one had ever heard it like that, live. And then off we went."

But there are a lot of Grateful dead tribute bands out there. What separates Dead On Live from the others?

"So many of the other bands are tributing the music of the Grateful Dead," he said. "But to me, hearing the records represents a time in space of the band – what they sounded like at that particular moment. It also makes the fans remember a point in time. As many Dead shows as you might have gone to, I think that when you hear ‘Sugar Magnolia’ in your head, you hear the studio record more than any other version. So I’m tributing the time in space of the band and the fans. When I play this stuff, I swear I’m 16 years old again."

That certainly explains Muller’s dealings with the Dead’s music, but how did his own music get to be played on The Weather Channel?

Page 3 of 3 - "I made an album called ‘Songs from My Hard Drive’," he said. "A friend of mine said it sounded like the stuff they play on The Weather Channel. So I mailed a demo version of my album to them. I didn’t hear anything, so I forgot about it. But about four months later I got an email saying we’ve selected your song. So they aired it, and then two months later they brought it back. And sure enough, I get royalties from one of my instrumentals. It’s called ‘Free Man in New Jersey’."